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Ross Ferguson, until recently the Director of the Hansard Society's eDemocracy programme, has now returned to his native Scotland to work at Dog Digital, started a blog, and is able to offer us some useful insights from his new perspective away from the Westminster bustle.
I talked to Ross at the e-democracy 07 conference just before he left, when he reflected on the past few years in e-democracy. Steady progress made, he felt, but in order to achieve more a greater number of politicians need to engage with the possibilities offered by engagement online. At present developments were too often driven by officials, companies and activists. Gaining more commitment would involve paying more attention to the way that online working can integrate with politicians' day-to-day work - rather than focussing solely on their external communications.

I was lucky enough to start work with the UK Government just as it began to take an interest in what we are now/currently calling social media. That was 2005 and there was hardly anything happening. Today, it's a different story.

With a host of initiatives on the go, I thought I'd pick out 10 that I think are particularly interesting:

Ministry of Justice - BarCampUKGovweb was an idea floating about waiting to happen, and Jeremy Gould got it off the ground. It's the first event of its kind for government.

National Health Service - The Our NHS, Our Future activity is putting a lot of weight on its online engagement components. The issue is meaty and its an intriguing opportunity for NHS stakeholders to direct its development. But will the people come? And how will the government tie up their online with the offline activity?

Foreign and Commonwealth Office - when David Miliband arrived, engagement shot up the agenda, particularly online. Not content with just the Secretary of State blogging, staff from across the FCO were invited to get in on the action and duly did.

Government Communications Network - the Social Media Review and associated activities, being led out of the GCN, is taking on the challenge of helping an area of government so used to controlling the message to adapt to a new communications environment.

Downing Street - it's use of ePetitions was the biggest UK eDemocracy story yet. But will it see out the winter? Well, yes, but with parliament planning its own online petitions system, will time be called on the government's biggest and most infamous social media experiment yet?

Communities and Local Government - the CLG rebuilt its corporate website using community software. The CLG was one of the first departments to make a conscious effort to utilise social media. The use of deliberative forums by a range of policy teams is worth watching alone, then you factor in the blogs and wikis and you start to realise the importance of this department's activity.

Defra - the software that runs the CO2 calculator, complete with the government data, has been made freely available under general public licence. Google has used it in its carbon footprint widget.

DirectGov - according to the ONS, 6 in 10 of the UK's web users have accessed government services via DirectGov. So, where to now? Is there room for a social media angle in the next phase of development?

Ministry of Justice - OK, I'm a bit bias but Digital Dialogues, which is in its final phase, has been putting data about government blogs, forums, webchats etc in the public domain since all this social media interest kicked off.

SS/SIS - a bit of a flippant inclusion. I've no idea what they're doing with social media but whatever it is, it's bound to be worth keeping an eye on.

Please flag up any others you know about. Maybe there's some similar stuff going on elsewhere in this big globe of ours.

People assume that if you are asked to make an input there is a consequence, and that consequence is transparent, tangible and makes you feel you have influenced something. People feel cheated when that doesn't happen I started from that basis because I wanted to say that politics is often a very similar experience for many people, and the question I wanted to ask is whether e-democracy is the panacea to that feeling of frustration and being cheated, or is it in fact a part of the problem.

They key issue, said Stephen, was that people want to be respected. If politicians and officials are to be trusted - as they wish - then they have to respect people. After 10 years of the Internet in politics, the argument that it makes a difference has been won.

The question now is how do we re-establish rules of the game that make it fair, make it meaningful to provide real efficacy for people - that's where we need to be thinking now - not shall we do it, but how do we do it. For me that has to be about a contract between the public and politicians that sets out very clear standards of engagement. If you are asked, whether it is to sign an e-petition, or to engage in an online consultation, or to send an email to your MP, there have got to be transparent procedures for what is expected to happen to that and where the process is.

Stephen went on to say that e-democracy has not significantly build trust between politicians and voters - the Consumers to Business relationship. What has happened is that social networking has developed the Consumer to Consumer relationship. That is where new ideas and better collective action is being developed. Government now has to have the humility to enter that social networking space to learn, and to make sure that there is equality of voice for the potentially socially excluded. What we need - among other things - is a common online space which is trusted and protected for online deliberation. BBC conference report: E-petitions: Godsend or gimmick?

Adding e- to democracy, government, participation and other elements of civil society has brought some benefits, but also helped develop a new sort of digital divide . The new divide is not so much between connected and unconnected, but between the sceptical, puzzled and frankly confused and a perhaps slightly smug band of professionals offering what Clifford Stoll called Silicon Snakeoil 10 years back. I know, I've been guilty of "what you really need to try is..." and enjoying that slight sense of power that comes from brandishing a new set of tools and esoteric terms.
The problem is compounded when e-people say to not-very-e-people "of course, it isn't about the technology ... " but then have difficulty completing the sentence. It suggests there's a magic ingredient we can't tell you about, but if you take the medicine technology it will do you good. You may not like it much, but change is always difficult, isn't it?
At the same time, the new e- tools are important, because as I was arguing earlier , they can help us work collaboratively, can be used to challenge power-holding institutions, and do allow us to work in both groups and networks. That helps develop a culture of openness, do good stuff together, and begin to realise the potential of collective intelligence.
Which led me to the question, what would democracy, government, participation look and feel like if we added o- for open instead of e- for electronic? Pretty good, I believe, but then - would it sell conference seats and kit?
Thanks to Steve, Paul, and Nick for yesterday's conversation that helped gell these ideas.
Update: Graham Lally has picked up the issue in a comment here, and also over at Sphereless

Political candidates once needed skills in dealing with hecklers ... then reporters and TV cameras. Now it's citizen's media. Steven Clift, who has been promoting e-democracy world-wide for the last ten years or more, has an impressive event lined up back in his US base, with candidates agreeing to cope with a potential barrage of podcasts, videos and photos as well as emails. It could be more challenging than big media. As Steven bills it in his press release:

The era of YouTube(TM) and MySpace(TM) meets Minnesota’s strong civic tradition of innovation, thanks to a new online debate with the gubernatorial candidates co-sponsored by Blandin Foundation and E-Democracy.Org.

The Minnesota Gubernatorial E-Debate will take place online from Monday, October 9th through Thursday, October 19th. Minnesotans can participate directly in the gubernatorial campaigns by using the Internet - including video, audio, pictures, and plain texts - to submit questions and share their views with candidates and fellow citizens.

The E-Debate is designed to promote and facilitate substantive, interactive, in-depth public discussions of candidate positions and proposals.

All of Minnesota’s official gubernatorial candidates appearing on the November ballot formally have confirmed their participation in the debate.

Voters will send email questions, and candidates have the option to provide their Opening Statement in video via the YouTube.com video sharing service. Candidates also may record their rebuttals into audio podcasts, and also provide links to content related to their answers.

Voters may participate by submitting text questions and by using the new “Voter Voices” section of E-Democracy’s web site to share their own video, audio, pictures, blog posts, links, and discussion forum messages across popular online services (for example, Flickr.com for photos, YouTube.com for video, blog posts via the Google blog search, etc.

Minnesotans are then invited to view an integrated, dynamic presentation of all of this material on a single web page www.e-democracy.org/voices

It's an impressive set up, and a long way from Steven's early initiatives with email lists. What's doubly impressive is the way that Steven has managed to catalyse so many initiatives around the world through a mix of hands-on demonstration, speaking and networking without much funding and without being the least bit grand about it. More at his Democracies Online site.

The Government's enthusiasm for double devolution, which Drew and I gamed recently with Kevin Harris, depends on more people being actively involved in community affairs. Kevin in Community leaders, or representation? has a suitably sceptical take on the tendency to brand people who do good stuff as 'leaders'.

Here I am reading a draft report from a meeting about neighbourhood governance, and the phrase 'community leaders' stops me, the way it always does. I have difficulty with the frequent and unreflective use of this term - not, I hope, just because of some wishy-washy resistance to hierarchical cultures, but more because I'm unconvinced that calling for more 'community leaders' is a solution to anything.

Kevin adds:

I think most use of the label refers to activists who play a prominent role, often representing locally a community of interest, sometimes falling victim to accusations of 'usual suspects' or becoming manipulable media products. I'm more concerned right now with the chorus of calls for more of them. (Are we gonna have some kind of genetic programme here, get them all to breed so we have a stock for the future?)
Maybe just whistling for more community leaders won't work, because we'll still have a gulf between them and the rest of us. If our democracy lacks the key ingredients of engagement and participation, I'm not sure it makes sense to crash-course a new cadre of likelies.
Maybe we need to ensure far more widespread understanding of the notion of representation. We need to smooth over the gap between representation and apathy, between involvement and disinterest. We need to establish the habit of participation and an understanding of what it means to be represented by someone, and what it means to represent others.Update - Stephen Coleman has kindly drawn my attention to his 2005 ippr pamphlet called Direct representation: towards a conversational democracy, which to my shame I had missed. He argues that we need to move to a richer, more conversational form of representation.

I like Stephen Coleman's approach. However, I was swayed in the direction of cherishing our traditional elected councillors more by a fascinating evening and a few pints recently with Paul Evans, who blogs over at Never Trust a Hippy. Paul is passionate about the need to revive local democracy, and we discursed widely on ideas about capacity building for councillors (if community groups can have it, why can't they) and even "adopt a councillor."
It reminded me that Jamie Rose, head of MORI's Participation Unit, gave a very relevant presentation at the recent Bristol conference on activists and councils. She was saying, as I recall, that research shows that we all have different levels of commitment to different issues - and if you score more than five you count as active. Activity will depend on time of life and circumstance. That suggests to me that branding someone "activist" isn't very helpful. You can find the presentation somewhere in the conference webcast. I'll check if it is available elsewhere.

With formal democracy in such poor health, and a Government Minister calling for double devolution of power to community groups, you might expect local councils to be desperately keen to encourage active citizens to drum up interest in elections. And if a group said they would give every candidate a free web site linked to an online hustings (something I believe councils can't do), you might expect high delight in the Town Hall and collaboration all round.
Not entirely so in Richmond upon Thames, however, where there is a sticking point: lamp-posts. There the volunteer-run online community site Oncom , that covers the borough, offered to run a May election site in exchange for one concession: they wanted to publicise it with placards on lamp-posts to make sure local people read what the politicians had to say, and democracy was widely served.
But the council has refused permission, stating: “It would set a dangerous precedent given the level of coverage desired and would add to street clutter.”

Volunteer Jill Sanders, who helps run the online community, sends me a series of email exchanges between her friend and site founder John Inglis, and the chief executive of the local authority, Gillian Norton, which are extremely courteous but quite adamant.

The chief exec adds: "We have tested this view quite hard but in the end that was the conclusion of discussions. However, we are very keen that this initiative gets good coverage and would hope that the posters could be displayed in libraries and other community facilities. It may be that Doctor's surgeries and other places where people visit/gather will be able to help."

This isn't good enough for Oncom.

“We must have the posters on every street if we are to make a success of the May Poll,” says community websites founder and developer, John Inglis. “Without this level of promotion there is no point in carrying out the massive task of creating candidate web pages. We have done this before and we know that everyone likely to vote needs to know about the May Poll, and the only way of doing this is to have posters about the website visible on every street across the borough.”

You can read the story here on Oncom, and I suggest while you are there you look around at what is a quite extraordinary example of what volunteers can achieve. Jill describes the project in more detail in egovmonitor. It is just the sort of project that first got me excited 10 years ago about the potential of the web at local level. Sadly most online local communities haven't done as well, perhaps because it is such hard work to cover the diversity of any area and its interests.

I've met Jill and John, and admire enormously the passion that they bring to their project. I gather there is, to put it mildly, a bit of history with the local authority. There may be good reasons for the lamp-post decision, but they are not evident in the e-mail exchanges. It's difficult not to feel that the local authority could be just that bit more helpful. Without that double devolution just isn't going to happen.

As I'm musing over Power to the People, and concluding this independent inquiry into Britain's Democracy is a bit top-down, Tom Steinberg and his inventive crew at mySociety come up with a neat way for us all to join in. Tom writes:

I expect you all read about the launch of the Power Inquiry report on Monday. mySociety has no formal connection with it, but I found it such a surprising, intriguing document (having read just the exec summary) that I thought it deserved a good roast-chicken-style picking apart and chewing over. In a nice way, of course. So, we did a bit of a 'theyworkforyou' to it: http://www.commentonpower.org/All unofficial, 100% fresh off the presses. Kudos to Chris Lightfoot and Francis Irving who built it all in less than a day. If nothing else, and if nobody wants to leave comments, I hope at least it'll mean more people read the summary.

Chris and Francis have developed a wonderfully simple site allowing margin comments to the 30 inquiry recommendations. Hmmm... how about a couple of extra boxes ... "none of the above" and "my recommendation"? Then it would be nice to have links to blogs....scope for reporting on the forthcoming conference...no, stop. The appeal of the site is that it's so straightforward. Every report should have one, preferably when there's still an opportunity to make a difference to the proposals.

The other day I went to the launch of Power to the People, the independent inquiry into Britain's Democracy, and came away not sure what to make of it. The message in the 300-page report was pretty clear and well reported, as the Make My Vote Count linkdump shows. In essence it was that the current way of doing politics is killing politics - and democracy too.

The chair of the inquiry, Helena Kennedy QC, summarised it in the press release (pdf download) and also gave an impassioned speech at the launch reception:

“Politics and government are increasingly in the hands of privileged elites as if democracy has run out of steam. Too often citizens are being evicted from decision-making – rarely asked to get involved and rarely listened to. As a result, they see no point in voting, joining a party or engaging with formal politics."

The reception was the usual fine affair - big atrium in Millbank, plenty of free drinks and nibbles - with a splinkling of senior politicians including Gordon Brown, Kenneth Clarke and David Davis. It was also pretty usual in that there were small badges but no hosting, so if you weren't an insider you had to squint at people's chests while deciding whether to risk introducing yourself inadequately to someone Important, or over-enthusiastically to someone who might prove difficult to escape. I'm not sure if there were many People there, but we are all invited to a post-launch conference on March 25.

The year-long inquiry, funded by two of the Joseph Rowntree trusts, was very thorough, taking in 1,500 public submissions and running a wide range of surveys and hearings. There seemed general agreement among the people I talked to that the analysis was sound: people are not disengaging because of negative news media, apathy, lack of time or other voter-centric factors. They are cheesed off in large part because participation in political processes doesn't seem to make much difference. As I've written before, that's a problem with lots of local engagement processes too, so I suppose I should have been pleased to find some agreement.
It wasn't until I was walking back to the Tube that my underlying uncertainty surfaced as a simple question: how did the inquiry move from it's enormous and thorough process of gathering evidence, to the challenge of coming up with its 30 recommendations... and do these recommendations really address the problem?
Page 38 of the report details the evidence-gathering, and says that the Commission then spent six months deliberating and discussing drafts of the report. The recommendations (pdf download) are comprehensive, and emphasise rebalancing power between different elements of the political system, changing voting systems, and strengthening engagement processes. There's lots about the role of the whips, Select Committees, decentralisation, citizenship education, and public hearings. Every local authority should have a "democracy hub".
But aren't these just the sort of political procedural mechanisms that people are sceptical about? At the reception there was also a fair representation of civil servants, think tankers and political advisers musing on rebutals, counter-proposals, and yes-buts. My misgivings about the report perhaps stemmed from a subconscious sniff at the rising scent of business as usual. The report argues cogently that it is important that citizens re-engage with the machinery of democracy. It dismisses various views that other types of engagement can be substituted. Fair enough, but I'm not sure that the procedures recommended are very appealing.
It was at this point another train of thought took over... and the key question surfaced. Where did the recommendations come from? How did the Commission move from analysis of evidence to recommendation? It took six months.... but how? Was it a matter of the staff and advisers drafting and redrafting, running Commission meetings and away-days? Or were there some procedures by which emerging ideas were tested back with those who submitted evidence? I couldn't see anything in the report about that ... though it may well be in the backup material, and the conference will provide an opportunity to find out more. For what it was worth, I contributed to the Inquiry through an interview and didn't hear about any further possible involvement.
Anyway, if it was an entirely internal process it does, for me, raise a question about whether the Commission is walking the talk, practising what it preaches, and so on. Is it really "downloading power" - as it advocates - or is it simply offering JACE - Just Another Consultation Exercise? In JACE the power-holding body consults with various stakeholders and comes back with options or recommendations generated by some black-box process managed by the experts. They then ask people to comment or choose among the recommendations, without offering ways to generate new ones. The whole package is then despatched to some other powers-that-be who may or may not take any notice. In short, the process of analysis, recommendation and delivery is out of the hands of most of the participants. General experience is that nothing happens, and people become further disenchanted.
I looked again at the inquiry's recommendations to see if there was just one thing where I could do something to make a difference. Nothing. The whole reform package depends upon the current power-holders changing the way things work. Will they? Do turkeys vote for Christmas?
Last year, when first looking at the work of the Commission, it struck me as pretty conventional and top-down. Still, there was a blog, so maybe there would be interaction throughout the process. I checked back today to find "The blog was archived as part of the end of the Inquiry's evidence-gathering phase". Even the archive is off-line. Suspicions confirmed. It was all JACE.

Just when we thought new media might help revive democracy by mixing blogs, forums, online polls and the like in with more traditional meetings, broadcasting and print we find the territory has shifted again. We should be looking at online gaming and virtual worlds, because that's where tomorrow's citizens are spending their time.

That anyway was the pitch tonight from Jo Twist, former BBC technology reporter and now heading up the think tank IPPR's Digital and Media Society programme. She was contributing to a New Stateman event 'Politics and New Media: where next?'.
Jo gave us a stack of statistics from BBC research showing that enormous numbers of young people and under 30s are spending lots of time interacting with other young people online. That's where they build their social networks and create content. As one said: "games put you in control".
Among Jo's favourites are Democracy Island and Second Life. Democracy Island is a New York Law School project. From the site, Democracy Island is a:

Virtual world environment to offer government entities and interest groups an on-line space for conducting citizen consultation. In short, this project will use the metaphor of the “county fair,” a familiar civic event in the life of a community. This will be a place – like a meeting tent, a town hall or even a shopping mall – where groups can congregate online. The aim of this project is to design a space where interested parties, such as trade associations, activist groups and scientific experts, will be able to set up virtual booths for presentation of information and deliberation as well as advocacy.

Second Life explains:

Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by nearly 100,000 people from around the globe.
From the moment you enter the World you’ll discover a vast digital continent, teeming with people, entertainment, experiences and opportunity. Once you’ve explored a bit, perhaps you’ll find a perfect parcel of land to build your house or business.
You’ll also be surrounded by the Creations of your fellow residents. Because residents retain the rights to their digital creations, they can buy, sell and trade with other residents.
The Marketplace currently supports millions of US dollars in monthly transactions. This commerce is handled with the in-world currency, the Linden dollar, which can be converted to US dollars at several thriving online currency exchanges.

Jo's point, as I understood it, is not simply that we have to move democracy online because that's where lots of people are. It is that games and virtual environments provide a model of the real world - its roles, events, procedures, ownerships - but much speeded up. I think I heard her say that the 'real world' processes of deliberation are just too slow.
I'm an enthusiast for games as ways of people playing through complex situations, and my experience of doing that with colleague Drew Mackie is that it really does help create a shared framework, good conversations, an understanding of power relationships and much more. However, I'm not an online gamer (yet), and I'm not sure whether online experience in virtual worlds translates into real world behaviours. We may have a chance to find out, through the IPPR programmes, because it sounds as if Jo is going to push for some work in this field. I'm away to Second Life to sign in. Jo says she has blue skin and red shoes there, so should be easy to find...
Jo reported for BBC online last year how gaming communities organised help and donations for Hurricane Katrina relief
Previously: It's been the year of the digital citizen, says BBC

Will Davies in evidence schmevidence? gives us the heart of his article in Open Democracy, examining what he calls the cult of evidence-based policy in Government. The issue he addresses is that people don't seem to value improvements in public services - even though there is firm evidence to show they are getting better. At the same time people may complain that things are getting worse when they aren't, as with some aspects of crime.
The trouble is that people want not just the facts, but the feel of the way that things are improving.

There is an important dimension to democracy that the evidence-based policy movement appears to miss. Democracy is not just about the desirability or otherwise of outcomes, but about the mechanisms used to select and achieve them. The government is bewildered that measured improvements in public services have not been noticed by the public, and that measured falls in crime have been accompanied by increased fears of crime, then tends to blame the media for excessive pessimism. But when policy is constructed and evaluated by anonymous statisticians, one cannot assume the public will share the government's assessment of it. In politics, it is not enough for something simply to be the best option; people must reach agreement that it is the best option, a process which then becomes constitutive of that option's value.

The processes of democracy are as important as the products ... it's not just what you do, but the way that you do it.